CookieTown 24.11.23-12.01.24

"Don't write yourself between worlds,

Rise up against the multiplicity of meanings, 

Trust in the trace of tears and learn to live."

., Verschenkter Rat, 1978, p.60

The flat areas of colour are overlaid : in this field, paint, transparencies, complementarities and contrasts act almost autonomously. The moving, vibrant abstraction of David Moses's painting also gives way to lines and flat tints that make easily recognisable figurative elements stand out : hands, eyes, faces, etc. The style in which these elements are drawn, without us really knowing it, inhabits our collective imagination and refers to the world of the "Silly Symphonies", a series of cartoons produced by the Disney Studios between 1929 and 1939.

These short films - which broke away from the usual heroes of the franchise such as Mickey, Donald Duck, Pluto, etc. - were based on the myths and folk tales of our societies. Remastered in the pop style of the time, these short animated films moved away from a classical narrative and tended more towards musical fables. Like dance, music and poetry, they don't tell much about themselves: it's all rhythms, blossoming wonders and a whole wonderful world that lives on gestures, joyful leaps and fantasies. One of the films, The Cookie Carnival, gives the exhibition its title. Dating from 1935, it features a parade of biscuits and sweets in the famous "Cookie town". The title is catchy and simple, but not childish: the reference to Disney's "Silly Symphonies" as a cultural product is pervasive and quickly identifiable, and between the lines we read a critique of this early pop cultural product to which some viewers became addicted, and which often conveyed questionable moral values, like so many historical markers of our occidental societies.

Each painting in David Moses' 'Silly Symphony' series is linked to a particular cartoon. He draws on a formal repertoire, characters and colour palette that he uses to compose these works, which are halfway between abstraction and figuration. By starting with an abstract background, David Moses lays the foundations for the pictorial intrigue in which he takes us. This background, often composed in acrylics, plays on a succession of layers to create a field of paint evoking shapes, moods and atmospheres that can already prefigure the figurative action that will later be added. It also allows the artist to quickly construct an initial composition on the canvas. To build the scene, the décor in which the rest will play out. Then, using dry pastels and acrylics, the artist draws fragments of characters and movement effects - objects characteristic of the adventures in these films, but also graphic effects of movement, speed and action. These are graphic characters borrowed not only from cartoons, but also from the history of painting, from the Futurists (Boccioni, Balla, Carrà, etc.) and the American paintings of the 1970s, such as those by Lee Lozano and Philip Guston.

In addition to his mastery of colour, these 'layers' drawn in David Moses' work are an expression of his talent as a draughtsman. It is here that his gesture is given the freedom it needs to represent movement and speed. The speed of animation and the dizzying speed of our lives.

The virtuosity of David Moses's work is revealed in the interplay of superimpositions and simultaneity. As the artist himself says: "It's important that the background or the film plays a role, but it's essential that the result works on its own. I want to create images that overwhelm the viewer - just as everyday life can do.

. Looking at his work is like catching a multitude of impressions in a single moment. These impressions are impossible to grasp one by one, and they all contribute to the vertigo that the tyranny of speed and movement can provoke. The works of David Moses also speak of the acceleration of the world through the prism of images and the mass media. By using the Silly Symphonies (1929-1939), which appeared with the beginnings of mass media, in his works, David Moses makes use of both the historical and iconographic bias of these films. The representation of movement is exacerbated in these short films (parades, automatism, rhythm, dances, music) and David Moses draws from them a repertoire of forms to represent simultaneity speed and disorder. In the German painter's paintings, the details are easily identifiable and understandable, but when they are mixed together, the image as a whole becomes illegible. This simultaneity of information and images, as in our own lives, makes us wonder: can we be and live 'here', in the present moment, if, as Paul Virillo said, 'everything is now'?  The narrative framework of David Moses's works seems infinite, giving us a view of our lives through the prism of an accumulation of layers, details that merge with each other like a cartoonish scrum. By injecting just the right amount of irony and figuration into the great unknown that is existence, the artist projects us into a world as narrative as a cartoon and as breathtaking as the cosmos. A place where everything accelerates and where, like in a cartoon, the crash seems inescapable.

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